This Is What Happens...

...when The Boss waves her hand, "popcorn! hot dogs!"

Cool du Jour

The 1983 NC StateWolfpack are finally getting a trip to the White House.

Xmastime Headlines

Only Fools du Jour

Footnote Found!

Five years ago I asked:

I never seem to have watched it all the way through at any one time, but the one scene from the 1988 documentary Imagine I never seem to miss is when some hippie wanders up to John Lennon's house, and instead of releasing the hounds Lennon not only talks to him but invites him in to eat!

Who the fuck is this guy? Is he alive? He's probably about 60 now. Has anyone ever found out who this guy is? Wouldn't it be great to ask "what was it like to find yourself sitting at a kitchen table with one  of the fucking Beatles?"? 

According to this post on John Lennon's Facebook page, his name is Claudio:

Is anyone in contact with Claudio, the John Lennon fan who turned up on John's doorstep in Ascot in May 1971 and is featured in the 'Gimme Some Truth' documentary?

We would like to get in touch with him. If you have ANY info about his whereabouts, please comment below or email admin@imaginepeace.com. THANK YOU.

Claudio was a confused, vulnerable, shell-shocked Vietnam veteran who came to Lennon's Ascot house in England from the San Francisco VA Medical Center in the USA. He was convinced that John was sending him messages in his lyrics that were asking him personally to come and meet him. John and he spoke outside, and then John invited Claudio into the kitchen to have something to eat, after which he went on his way.

Born in the Purple USA

I knew Bruce would open his show with a Prince tribute, but I never woulda guessed Purple Rain. Incredibly ballsy choice, and of course he nailed it.

This is Freaky & Intoxicating As Fuck.

Real-time simulatioon  of the Titanic sinking. Wow.

Hey Ho

The first Ramones album came out 40 years ago today. It's only my 4th favorite Ramones album but that's like saying my least favorite Beatles album is Abbey Road - it's still an A+ and is amazing. It's almost impossible to calculate the impact if had on every person who later picked up a guitar, even all these decades later (the album didn't go gold until 2 years ago.) Meanwhile, when I was a kid you had to search out the rare fan; nowadays you can barely go a block without seeing a baby in a Ramones onesie. It wouldn't be an exaggeration to say they're the single most influential band in rock history since following The Beatles.

Enjoy.  I know I will.

True Confessions

The day before Prince died, I'd worked up in my head a riff based around the fact that every song you loved as a kid was actually about fucking.

"So kid, what's Hungry Like the Wolf about?"
"Oh, we're running through a cool jungle! With wolves!"
"Nope. It's about fucking."

"So kid, what's Little Red Corvette about?"
"Riding around showing off the coolest car in town!"
"Nope. It's about fucking."

Prince

Fellow Minneapolis resident Paul Westerberg on Prince:

My first recollection of seeing him was a dress rehearsal for one of his early tours. I was next to another musician, a couple other guys that were up-and-comers and that thought they were hot shit, and we were watching Prince. The guy turned to me and said, "I'm fucking embarrassed to be alive." And that's how I felt. He was so good. It was like, "What are we doing? This guy is, like, on a different planet than we are." It was showmanship, it was rock & roll, it was fun, it was great. I think it helped everyone around. It made us all think that Minneapolis wasn't the dour town that we tried to pretend it was. He was like a ray of light in a very cautious place. He was a star. He made no bones about it. He was glitz to a place that wasn't used to it. I remember a little scuffle broke out in front of the stage one night and Prince said, "Stop fighting, you'll mess up your clothes."

Damn.

Prince is dead. Bowie/Merle/George Martin/Prince. Starting to feel like every damn day is The Day the Music Died.

This will always be my favorite Prince moment, the greatest guitar solo ever.

Dad Rock

Great podcast reminding us the Violent Femmes were more than their (incredible) first record.

Maybe I Should Leave My Apartment More Often

Not Too Shabby.

Big Bear Memory du Jour

Via HERE.

(walking with Big Bear to pick Cherry Bomb up from school and trying to gauge if we could make it home before it started raining, or if I needed to call for a car service)

Xmastime: how long does it take to get from Cherry Bomb's school to home?
Big Bear: same as it does from home to her school.

Boom!  :)

Subway Memories

Gawker has the 10 WORST PEOPLE ON THE SUBWAY, including blah blah blah and zzzzzzzzzzzzz and whogivesashitwhatanyonebutmesays.

Which of course gives me a reason to highlight a few of the zillion posts I've had about the subway, including:

Train door douchebag guy

Hipster douchebag bag guy

Coffee douchebag guy

Metrocard douchebags

iPod douchebags

Cock-blocking douchebags

Slow-moving motherfucking douchebags

Of course the subway is the single greatest setting for nangulance, including

HERE

and

HERE

But rest assured - I'll never give up my train platform dream:

The next thing on my to-do list is to show up at subway platforms and stare in the wrong direction for the train. Ever see anyone do this? Doesn't it drive you bananas? At any given moment there's 10 or 15 people staring intensely down the tracks into the tunnel; I'm gonna stare right back in their direction, looking annoyed "where the fuck is this train??!!!" One, they'll start getting pissed cause it's some dude looking in their face. Then they start thinking doesn't this dude know which way the fucking train comes? Then they're really pissed and think doesn't this dude see that everybody else is staring in the other direction??!! And me, staring, shaking my head "where the fuck is this train?" just as their heads fucking explode into a thousand pieces.

Thoughts. I Have Them.

If you'd told me it was possible for a very funny sitcom to replace Andy Samberg with one of the kids from Twilight and it then would be even funnier, I can't say I woulda believed you. And yet here we are.

BBC Is the Greatest

In listing my favorite BBC shows by decade, the current one is surprisingly well-represented. While only one is in my Top 10 (ie in bold), the sheer quantity speaks incredibly well of what's been going on at the BBC lately. And that's not even counting dramas such as Downton Abbey or the spectacular Wolf Hall.

70s
Rising Damp
Fawlty Towers
The Good Life
Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads
To the Manor Born
Open All Hours

80s
Only Fools and Horses
Blackadder

90s
Father Ted
Chef
The Vicar of Dibley
Alan Partridge Show

00s
IT Crowd
Black Books
Nighty Night
Miranda
The Inbetweeners
Peep Show
The Worst Week of My Life

10s
Hunderby
Fresh Meat
Detectorists
Chickens
Twenty Twelve
The Whites
Spy
The Other Man(s)
Vicious
Rev.
Moone Boy

Opportunity Lost

BBC II

Last year I listed the amazing BBC shows I'd recently found, mostly thanks to Hulu. Here's a list of ones I've found in just the past few months, all fucking awesome and making me want more.

BOLD = top 5

Rising Damp
Father Ted
The IT Crowd*
Black Books
Hunderby
Fresh Meat
Nighty Night
The Detectorists
Miranda
Chef
Chickens
The Inbetweeners

 *this I'd seen before

Maybe I'll set up an even bigger tournament this year!! 

Per the video below, Bob Mehr, author of the great Trouble Boys: The True Story of The Replacements, had some interesting insights on what created the band and the world they came out of:

I appreciated that when you introduced people, you would say, “So-and-so is from South Minneapolis, they’re second-generation Polish-American, they’re the eighth of 10 kids, they’re Catholic, and their dad was a fall-down drunk.” It seems like about 70 percent of the people in the book have that same background. It shows you another context for how punk rock got born — how people came up in Minneapolis and what they were rebelling against. People were coming out of these lineages where their dad was in the war and would come home and never spoke about anything, bestowing all of this freighted manhood on their sons. What else were they going to do but start a screamy punk band?
Mehr: That is it. The book is about American families, damaged American families, what happens to those children, and how they relate to the world through rock and roll.

Toward the end, it was all completely in spite of themselves.
Mehr: That’s the funny thing I came away with. This isn’t true for every band, and maybe wasn’t true for The Replacements, but you understand just how complex a band relationship is. You’re talking about the four people — not just their relationship with each other and the music they’re making, but every bit of their lives leading up to that point, which goes into what the music is, how everything plays out. For me, that’s the complexity, the places they can go — from [Omaha Beach], where Paul’s father was walking after D-Day, and how that affected his father and how that affected Paul. Obviously, people are the sum of their lives, but sometimes we think a band is just four guys who got together in a garage, and sometimes it’s a lot more than that.

Replacements du Jour

Pretty hilarious/informative (ie I don't think that's apple juice in their cups) MTV (wow, talking about music?!??!!?!) Kurt Loder interview with Paul Westerberg & Tommy Stinson promoting Don't Tell a Soul.

Outliers?

Article on Salon today calling bullshit-ish on Malcom Gladwell's famous 10,000 hour rule:

Yes, the Beatles almost certainly improved as a band after their many hours of playing in Hamburg, particularly because they tended to play the same songs night after night, which gave them the opportunity to get feedback — both from the crowd and themselves — on their performance and find ways to improve it. But an hour of playing in front of a crowd, where the focus is on delivering the best possible performance at the time, is not the same as an hour of focused, goal-driven practice that is designed to address certain weaknesses and make certain improvements — the sort of practice that was the key factor in explaining the abilities of the Berlin student violinists. 

A closely related issue is that, as Lewisohn argues, the success of the Beatles was not due to how well they performed other people’s music but rather to their songwriting and creation of their own new music. Thus, if we are to explain the Beatles’ success in terms of practice, we need to identify the activities that allowed John Lennon and Paul McCartney—the group’s two primary songwriters—to develop and improve their skill at writing songs. All of the hours that the Beatles spent playing concerts in Hamburg would have done little, if anything, to help Lennon and McCartney become better songwriters, so we need to look elsewhere to explain the Beatles’ success.

Xmastime New BBC Slice du Jour

RISING DAMP
1975-1978

1. An all-time sitcom character in Rigsby
2. Set looks like it was built for $10, dark and dirty
3. Looks like a play
4. A minimum of characters in each episode
5. A tragic actor in Richard Beckinsale (Kate Beckinsale's father), heartthrob from another classic series Porridge who died suddenly at 31
6. A British Carol Burnett in Frances de la Tour (lookitthemchompers!) who is also in another Xmastime slice, Vicious
7. Introduces me to Eric Chappell, who wrote a seemingly billion BBC series in the 70s/80s/90s, giving myself a BBC comedy triumvirate of Chappell, Richard Curtis and Graham Linehan

Questions. I Have Them.

Can someone please write the movie in which we find out Holden Caulfield grows up to be Pete Campbell so I don't have to thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaanks.

Tunrs Out We Coulda Nipped This In the Bud Years Ago

OMG ENGLAND REALLY IS A PARADISE!!!!

What Took So Long?

There is now a Williamsburg version of Monopoly because of course there is.

A Welcome Salve For a Sad Day in Music. ‪#‎almostover‬

Helluva Marquee

R.I.P. Merle

Only Fools du Jour

One Year Ago Today

Damn.

Earl's friends said he'd never make it in the big city but he wouldn't listen.

Finally, A Reason to Have Children

Only Fools du Jour

Ouch!

Not For You Half Yum Pussies.

Thoughts. I Have Them.

Pretty sure my size and eating habits totally belie my addiction to online nutrition calculators.

Thoughts on the First Real World Season. I Have Them, VI.

No way in hell I coulda known Andre for 10 minutes in 1992 before calling him "Singles."

Thoughts on the First Real World Season. I Have Them, V.

Pretty amazing Sunday so far, lounging around in my drawers binging Season 1 of The Real World OMG I just realized I've become my father. Dammit.

Thoughts on the First Real World Season. I Have Them, IV.

I've never worried much about younger generations being able to run things until realizing that after 30 seasons, the cast of The Real World are still totally surprised to find out the house they'll be living in is outrageously amazing.

Thoughts on the First Real World Season. I Have Them, III.

It seems to be very important to me that any delivery person at my door not be disappointed with my tv choices.

Thoughts on the First Real World Season. I Have Them, II.

Watching isn't making me nostalgic for the 90s but it is making me nostalgic for a time when people my age apparently ate spaghetti three meals a day.

Thoughts on the First Real World Season. I Have Them.

If you weren't already feeling old as fuck today, I just stumbled upon the first ever episode and Julie mentions her dad wants her to be a "computer operator."

One Year Ago Today My First Pulitzer Prize-Winning Best-Selling Novel Came Out

For you last 6,999,999,940 people around the world who still haven't bought the book, shame on you. I don't know how you can sleep at night...BUT maybe buying it right now will help with that!!!!